Virtual Stuff

According to the New York Times, Stuff Matters in Virtual Worlds:
When people have the opportunity to create a fantasy world, they can and do defy the laws of gravity (you can fly, and walk under water in Second Life), but not of economics or human nature.

Second Life residents often take virtual jobs, even poorly-paid ones. They are evidently discovering what inheritors have struggled with for generations: It’s not as much fun to spend money you haven’t earned.

Robert J. Bloomfield, a behavioral economist at Cornell University, studies investor behavior in the real world and recently became interested in how investors behave similarly in Second Life. Reporter Daniel Terdiman's book “Entrepreneur’s Guide to Second Life” will be published soon. Not only does stuff matter to residents of SL, it provides rich opportunities for research, analysis and publication.

Red Herring Redux

Josh Catone at Read/Write Web reviews the up and down history of Red Herring magazine as their website relaunched this week. He especially notes their new social networking elements.

Red Herring might want to note the O'Reilly Rader review of HarperCollins new initiative to make 14 new books available for download to the iPhone. A quick look at the thousands of posts in the Lulu Community Forum might also be informative.

The HP marketing blog recently changed its name to Digital Mindset. The long running joke Mintz mentions, that HP would have marketed sushi as "cold dead fish", no doubt came to HP by way of Compaq, nee Digital Equipment Corporation.

Sales vs Downloads

Tim O'Reilly has just posted a case study looking at the relationship between (free) downloads and book sales of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, by Leif Madsen, Jared Smith, and Jim Van Meggelen. The book was released for free download under a Creative Commons license.

Social (Editorial) Calendars

Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion says:

Editorial calendars break out some ... of the major feature articles an outlet plans to publish. This helps PR professionals target their pitches to fit into these stories. However, it's really intended for media buyers so they can purchase ad space near very relevant articles. These are guides and the information changes frequently. The information is usually part of a media kit. They tend to be sparse too.

There's a lot of room for innovation when it comes to editorial calendars. For starters, why shouldn't they be social?

In the interest of furthering this discussion (and structuring my life a little bit) I have published an editorial calendar for Micropersuasion.

MyEdCals is a large database of editorial calendars. ARA Content provides copyright-free content as well as editorial calendars. But the Forward blog explains why editorial calendars are long out of date.